For years, Ask.com has been creating massive amounts of content by independent writers to answer basic questions. The media giant hires writers “experts” to focus on a specific topic like automotive, retail, marketing or even local real estate. Most people come across Ask.com via Google and because they have so much content, they seek to answer questions by being the search result.
Today, this all changes as Ask.com announces they will launch a question and answer community that is currently invite only and in beta but could easily be the next Trulia Voices or indirect ratings site (not based on sheer number ratings, but based upon crowdsourcing opinion as an indirect rating of a product’s worthiness).
Ask.com says that this project is a little different than existing communities however, because they have “taken the last year to enhance [their] offering to locate the most relevant, high-quality answer and display it right at the top of page (surfing through 10 blue links not required).”
They proclaim that they have the ability to manually “route questions to relevant people based on interests and expertise. This means only the right people will be asked to answer a specific question, reducing spam and question fatigue. Responses from our community will also be indexed and available (depending on level of freshness and relevance) to address future questions posed on Ask.com.”
Above is what the new site looks like and although it’s not an original concept, they already have massive traffic which is as highly attractive to real estate agents as honey is to bears or candy is to toddlers or bacon is to men and puppies.
As a real estate professional, are you currently answering questions in another forum online? Would you invest your time answering questions about real estate on the new Ask.com? Tell us in the comments below.
